tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5698059.post4637111677367190383..comments2016-09-08T09:42:42.288-04:00Comments on The Mumpsimus: Double Feature: Hunger and EndgameMatthew Cheneyhttps://plus.google.com/109233497006166204043noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5698059.post-11128239045234369262010-02-24T16:47:02.075-05:002010-02-24T16:47:02.075-05:00You should check out Michael Sicinski&#39;s review...You should check out <a href="http://academichack.net/reviewsOctober2008.htm#Hunger" rel="nofollow">Michael Sicinski&#39;s review of Hunger</a>:<br /><br /><i>We are left with the same questions that Sands and Moran laid before us at halftime. Is this heroic? Are we changed by the vicarious sacrifice represented onscreen? Or is it simply an extended dead end, the frank recognition that absolute empathy is impossible? More to the point, how can Bobby Sands and the Republicans, or anyone else, square the political signification of the hunger strike with what we see, and what Sands undergoes? After all, what Sands undergoes is an irreducibly particular death, the extinguishing of a wholly unique and forever irreplaceable light in the world. For Sands&#39; sacrifice to obtain value as protest, it must function synecdochically. His particular body, and those who starved in his wake, must achieve generality. They must be soldiers, Irishmen, not just singular human beings with grieving Mums and Dads and wives and children. And yet, the necessary power of the sacrifice also requires that that full individual dissolution, with all the will and waste it entails, must somehow be retained. Part and whole, all at once. McQueen, ever the body-conscious sculptor, he who intended to memorialize the Iraq War with postage stamps bearing the likeness of each and every British serviceman and woman killed in combat (a project the government nixed, logically, incomprehensibly), needs the so-called &quot;conventional&quot; final act of Hunger to put the whole question of the strike, and political representation itself, to the test. The film shows us pictures of a body beaten beyond all idealism, whose final citadel of human sovereignty was a turning of the bludgeon inward. Geopolitics as anorexia, and vice versa. Does this drama, played on the surface of a man&#39;s skin but fought from the inside, show us anything at all? Even as Hunger honors the dignity of the decisions taken by Sands and his followers, McQueen leaves us suspended in a state of absolute uncertainty.</i>Rick S.noreply@blogger.com